RISC OS Computers: the PC Card

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Acorn's RiscPC can emulate a PC using a small plug-in card, of which several types have been available over the years. These cards plug into the second processor slot in an Acorn or Castle RiscPC and share the computer's resources such as keyboard, mouse, display and disk drives, thanks to a clever chip called Gemini.

Because the disk formatting is different from the native RISC OS format, the PC files are kept in a pseudo drive—actually a file containing files. This is a so-called partition file, and is typically called Drive_C. A second partition can be set up (Drive_D), and these can be any suitable size up to 2 GBytes apiece. The driving software allows for a number of different configurations, each of which can (but doesn't have to) have different partitions. For example, some users have separate Drive_C partitions for running DOS and Windows (typically 95 or 98, but sometimes Win 3·11).

There are a number of advantages to this arrangement:

It is cheaper than buying two separate computers, though the difference has become much less in recent years
This arrangement takes up less desk space than two machines, and they are equally accessible
Data transfer (including backing up) between the two is much easier, as the PC "drive(s)" can be accessed just like native RISC OS disks, both hard disks and floppies, and handled in exactly the same way from the RISC OS side
To be safe from viruses, disk corruption and the like, all one has to do is take a copy of the Drive_C file and use it to replace any infected or otherwise damaged version

Nowadays, some eight years after the RiscPC's launch, the PC world has moved on so much that the usefulness of the PC Card is insufficient to meet many users' needs; but it was a great idea at the time and is still useful for comparatively basic tasks.

This is the base-model 486-processor PC Card. Others were available from Acorn and other sources such as Aleph One, up to a 133 MHz 586-processor card.

This photograph shows the PC/Second Processor Card installed in its slot in an Acorn RiscPC. Here are some screenshots showing what the PC Card can do.

Please note: all copyrighted names in the above text are fully acknowledged.

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